I'm asking if God is empirically real. The answer doesn't have to be shrouded in metaphysics. I accept there's no evidence for God, but when people say/imply that perhaps there is metaphysical reasoning for God, I equate the reasoning to "imagination".
You have your answer from the theists themselves: No. That's why they tell you to stop searching for evidence. Something is empirically real or true when we can experience it through the external or internal senses, which does not include intuitions about gods or anything else.
Here's a comment from atheist firebrand Pat Condell that says it well for me:
"Faith-peddlers like to put themselves beyond question by claiming that their faith transcends reason, the very thing that calls it to account. How convenient. Yes, faith transcends reason the way a criminal transcends the law. The word "transcendent" is very popular with religious hustlers because they never have to explain precisely what they mean by it, other than some vague superior state of understanding more profound than mere reason, which is crude and simplistic next to the subtleties and profundities of belief without evidence. If you hear a senior clergyman (and you will) using the word “transcendent" to explain the nonsense he claims to believe, then you know two things: one: he doesn't know what he's talking about, and two: he doesn't want you to know what he's talking about either. Faith doesn't transcend reason at all. Faith sidesteps reason. It runs away from reason because reason threatens its cozy bubble of delusion, so faith disqualifies reason the way a Dutch criminal court disqualifies truth, and witnesses, and for much the same reason."
Comments like God doesn't exist in space or time or claims about a supernatural realm are verbal sleights-of-hand to defend belief in an imaginary entity with no referent outside of imagination. They're explanations for why something that isn't real can't be experienced yet is real anyway.
Hold your ground. Let them have their comforting interpretations of reality, but you needn't join them or believe them, and it sounds like you know that and won't.
I am real because I can feel myself and look at myself in the mirror. I don't doubt that the world is real, and I exist in the world. Do you doubt that the world is real?
You can and should doubt that the world that you imagine underlies your experiences - that your experiences are experiences of what you think they are - can be safely and intelligently doubted using what can be called philosophical doubt, which is understanding absence any feeling.
There are a large assortment of other ideas about what lies on the other side of our conscious content such as Boltzmann brains, a matrix, a brain in a vat, and last Thursdayism. As Descartes suggested, we can't know anything about the nature of our experiences except that we are having them, and I would add rules for using them to affect future experiences. Let me illustrate:
Suppose you discovered for an indisputable fact that the world outside was an illusion. Nevertheless, you still see your hand and finger and a flame on a candle. It's not real, you think, and stick your imagined finger into the imagined flame, it burns and hurts, you imagine that you quickly withdrew you imagined finger from that imagined flame, and the pain ends. Are you going to do it again, or just go back to the old rules that always worked before and still work now?
My point is that you can hold philosophical doubt about what reality is. It's pretty hard to hold psychological doubt, which is a feeling of uncertainty distinct from an understanding of uncertainty, for very long.
And the other side of consciousness is what metaphysics refers to to me. Physics is the study of the conscious phenomena that we understand as coming from outside of the body and of the body itself as well, which is physical. Metaphysics is what we think those conscious experiences imply about the other side of consciousness, a space we can never visit or experience directly. Physics is about what appears in consciousness and metaphysics about what we presume underlies that experience. The model we choose doesn't need to be correct. It just needs to work, as the illustration with the flame illustrates. And that's good, because we have no means to verify that our model is correct. Feel free to doubt it. It won't change how you live your life.
Likewise with libertarian free will. It's not too difficult a task to get to the point where you understand that it may not exist and that we are the robots operating deterministically with a feeling that our conscious subject is the source of those desires that the faithful say their gods don't want. I have, but it's philosophical doubt. I understand that my will might be the product of neurons firing deterministically and delivering ideas to consciousness that I imagine arose there rather than being imported, and Iam perfectly fine with that possibility. If it's correct, that's the way it is and has always been.
But I can't maintain psychological doubt for long. As soon as I stop having discussions or thoughts like these, I live as if my will were free, because that's an inescapable intuition. As with the flame, even if I knew for a fact that will was not free, nothing changes. I would go on living as before. Discovering that is shocking at first, but once one becomes comfortable with holding philosophical doubt, the world goes on being as it always has been.
So that's a category error. A type mismatch. This is logically flawed, and philosophically absurd. Scientifically flawed and against the philosophy of science. Bad argument in every possible way.
That was a response to, "I'm just asking if there is evidence for God. You said I shouldn't look for evidence for God in the real world aka "empirical world."
Not because you say so.
I consider your comment more verbal sleight-of-hand. It's one of many ways of trying to make the nonexistent real - a variation on Condell's comment, "Faith-peddlers like to put themselves beyond question by claiming that their faith transcends reason." Your method is a little different. You're telling him that his reasoning is flawed. It's not.
He's exactly where he should be - rejecting claims about unseen gods. Requiring evidence before belief is not a category error, nor scientifically flawed (it the essence of empiricism), nor a violation of the philosophy of science. I don't feel the need to explain why, since all you provided were unargued, unevidenced claims.
And I hope
@an anarchist understands that and rejects these word games. To him I say that the agnostic atheist does not claim that gods do not exist, because he cannot know that any more than that he can know they do at this time and in this place. Maybe they do. But we should reject the claims from the faithful that they have experienced gods or communed with them. There is no need, reason or value in accepting such claims.
Even if a god does exist somewhere, there is no value in knowing that, and no way to know it.
